4. Most Helpful

This is an ideal use of Haiku Deck — short, sweet, to the point. {Create your own deck like this in just a few minutes with our handy Idea Sharing template.}

Great tips! We definitely try to observe “fluff-free meetings” here at the office, and I’m an especially big fan of the “say no” tactic.

This is just one in a series of stand-out Haiku Decks created by the resourceful team at PGI and shared on SlideShare. {Uploading to SlideShare is a terrific way to amplify your reach: This one got nearly 20K combined views!} Blakely discovered that with Haiku Deck, they were able to produce useful, shareable content at a fraction of the cost of custom PowerPoints. Keep those great Haiku Decks coming, team PGI!

Stowe’s Haiku Deck stands out for its depth and substance. He packs so much clarifying detail into the Notes that this Haiku Deck could easily stand alone as an ebook.

It’s a terrific example of sharing a groundbreaking idea in manifesto form.

His use of THIS (NOT THAT) headlines creates a compelling sense of rhythm, bringing his concept into focus in the process. We’d love to see more of your thoughts on the future of work in Haiku Deck form, Stowe!

Congratulations to all of this year’s honorees — and special thanks to all of you who have created, enjoyed, and shared inspiring presentations throughout the year. We are incredibly grateful for your creativity and support, and we wish you a happy and productive 2015!

Haiku Deck Rock Star Series: Showcasing Company Values and Culture

There’s nothing quite like the last few work days of the year — they’re a bit quieter yet also more festive, with heightened camaraderie and (if your office is anything like ours) heightened quantities of hot chocolate and peppermint bark. Creative fuel, we call it…

In my book, it’s an ideal time for reflecting on the year’s accomplishments and tackling important, yet often-delayed, projects like capturing company values and guiding principles. Here’s one I put together in well under an hour.

Making values visible — and visual — helps make them real, and also sets the tone beautifully for next year’s plans and goals.

After all, if your company values and mission/vision statements truly matter, they deserve to be showcased in a beautiful, inspiring format, not pinned forlornly to the wall above the copy machine or buried in an Intranet folder.

Making values visible — and visual — helps make them real, and also sets the tone beautifully for next year’s plans and goals.

To help you get to that satisfying “done” even faster, here’s a template you can use to showcase your company values in a beautiful, visual Haiku Deck.

The paragraph slide type gives you a bit more text to work with for capturing a concise founding story, an inspiring quote from your founder, or a well-crafted mission statement. If you need more space, you can always add detail in the Notes field.

More in the Rock Star Series

Haiku Deck Rock Star Series: Building Thought Leadership

We believe everybody has ideas and stories that are worth sharing — yes, you!

It might be social media tips, a unique approach to landing real estate listings, or thoughts about the future of education or ecommerce, but your unique expertise and insights can help others interested in your topic, and they can help you extend your personal brand as well through thought leadership.

At work we think and talk a lot about presentation technology and trends (naturally), but I don’t always take the time to zoom out and capture these thoughts.

When I noticed that one of the month’s showcase themes on SlideShare was “Future Of…,” it was pretty easy to put this together.

I uploaded my Haiku Deck to SlideShare (where it reached more than 10,000 people in a single weekend), shared it on all of my social networks, and added a link to my email signature. Sometimes I’m wowed by how quickly content like this can spread when you just put your ideas out there.

Sometimes I’m wowed by how quickly content like this can spread when you just put your ideas out there.

What kind of thought leadership content could you create? What have you learned or observed this year, or what trends do you see for next year? I’d love to see your thought leadership Haiku Decks out there, spreading ideas and inspiration.

What have you learned or observed this year, or what trends do you see for next year?

To make it easy, here’s an idea sharing template you can use as a visual model, plus my favorite “rock star” tips:

Rock Star Tips for Creating Thought Leadership Content

This is an ideal place to try out the new logo slide type — you can add your company logo or even a picture of yourself to connect your ideas to your identity.

For this kind of highly shareable content, you want to make sure your message is self-contained within your slides. It’s a perfect place to use the paragraph slide type to be sure each idea is expressed clearly and fully. (Remember that more and more presentation content is viewed on mobile devices, where Notes may not be visible.)

Sample paragraph slide

This doesn’t mean you should cram your slides full of text, however — you want to keep your ideas crisp, clear, and easy to scan.

You can set your deck privacy to “private” or “restricted” while you’re working on it, but don’t forget to change it to “public” to get your ideas out there!

None of that would have been possible without our amazing creative community, and we wanted to do something as a little thank you. Since “more fonts” is a very frequently requested feature, we’ve added 14 new fonts and image filters to the web by adding premium themes that were previously only available on the iPad.

Plus, we made all 20 themes free for both iPad and the web!

Selecting a Theme

To check out the new free themes in the app, simply tap or click on the “FONTS/THEMES” tab in the top center of edit mode:

If you’d like to learn more about each theme, we’ve included a short summary, screenshots, and links to our Pinterest boards dedicated to showcasing examples of each of our themes, here.

Share Your Story

Now, you can make the most stylish holiday greeting or wish list ever. Tweet us the results with #hdholiday or drop us a line at gallery@haikudeck.com – we’d love to see how you use the new themes!